Tweets beat mainstream media at its own game

In the media business, it is often what is not printed or broadcast that is far more important than what is published or aired. When the Radia tapes scandal broke on November 18 featuring conversations between several top journalists and India's top corporate lobbyist Nira Radia and how she had influenced the former, there was a deathly silence in the mainstream media.

Open and Outlook magazines published the conversations in the form of transcripts and digital audio files that could be heard online. MAIL TODAY joined in writing about the controversy a day later to highlight how governments, political parties and corporations corrupt journalists by doling out freebies in the form of land, cars, free amenities, and other perks not associated with their formal jobs.

The silence of rest of the media was deafening. It was as if the Radia tapes existed in some parallel universe and only the top publications and TV news channels had access to the wormhole that connects this universe with that one.

And it would have been like that had Twitter not entered the picture and forced, quite literally, top media houses to follow a story that had the potential to damage one the strongest pillars of India's democracy.

India has more than eight million Twitter users, a figure that has almost doubled in the last one year (it was 4.2 million in January 2010). On an average, close to three million users from India log on to Twitter each day.

It is not a small force. It is the same set of people that consume news, are educated, are active online, are fiercely patriotic and are passionate about issues that are close to their heart. Journalists engaging in potentially damaging (and damning) conversations with a power broker as if it were de rigueur for media professionals to do so is only one such issue.

Within hours of Open magazine publishing the tapes, the Twitterati were up in arms against NDTV group editor Barkha Dutt and Hindustan Times advisory editorial director Vir Sanghvi. The former is featured in the conversation as allegedly acting as a messenger between the political party DMK and the Congress during the cabinet formation in May 2009. The latter is heard as taking instructions from Radia as to how his column should be written for the following Sunday.

The outrage forced Dutt (who has more than 2.34 lakh followers on Twitter) to respond on the social media site. She kept denying any wrongdoing, however, as did Sanghvi (who has 4.29 lakh Twitter followers) on his blog as well as his Counterpoint column in Hindustan Times. All through this online drama, the mainstream news media were still quiet. But online, the action continued 24x7. In that sense, Twitter has become a double- edged sword for "celebrity" tweeters.

Meanwhile, Facebook pages came up asking for accountability for journalists.

Shivam Vij, a freelance journalist and an author, began an online collaborative venture asking those who have some free time on their hands to transcribe all the audio conversations featuring Ms Radia and the journalists, politicians and businessmen. Transcribing the conversations and giving them permanent space online would make them searchable on Google and other search sites.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, hash tags such as # mediamafia reflected the anger of the reader/ viewer.

And since many of the top journalists involved in the conversations are on Twitter, they bore the brunt of the online anger. But it took them almost two weeks to react and put the stories as part of their prime time news package or in the case of newspapers, either on the front pages or their edit pages. It was a victory for Twitter like no other.

Twitter has been around for four years, but the first spike in usage in India came during the November 26, 2008, terror attack in Mumbai when citizens became instant journalists and told the world what they saw in front of them using their mobile phones. Since then, Twitter has only grown in influence to the extent that even celebrities began to make their announcements on Twitter.

Ironically, Twitter became a mainstream story at the same time when the mainstream media became a Twitter story, there was little that the traditional media knew about how to react. What was more interesting was the battle between journalists themselves. Sanghvi more or less decided to keep quiet on Twitter despite the thousands of tweets directed at him, but Dutt did not pull any punches, despite the large number of followers she has on Twitter.

It was riveting but at the same time revealing.

No matter where this drama goes, the fact is that Twitter is now a force to reckon with.

Online media in India rarely, if ever, gets its due. But it is social media, with its ability to become, as a senior journalist put yesterday, a lynch mob that is something that media professionals would do well to remember.

It is debatable whether a "lynch mob" or a "mass movement" would describe the phenomenon.

It does not matter, really, because social media has well and truly arrived in India.

The good old PC may well be on its way outIn five words, IDC, the world's leading technology research company, spelled the death knell for personal computers in its latest research report published on Thursday - "The PC- centric era is over." Instead it will be devices such as smartphones and tablet computers and technologies such as cloud computing and social networking that will push the PC out of a crowded market. This is second such report to be published in a space of four days, the previous one being Gartner's. In one section of the report, IDC says: "Mobile computing - on a variety of devices and through a range of new applications - will continue to explode in 2011, forming another critical plank in the new industry platform. IDC expects shipments of appcapable, non- PC mobile devices (smartphones, media tablets, etc.) will outnumber PC shipments within the next 18 months - and there will be no looking back." Frank Gens, senior vice- president and chief analyst at IDC said: "In 2011, we expect to see these transformative technologies make the critical transition from early adopter status to early mainstream adoption.

As a result, we'll see the IT industry revolving more and more around the build- out and adoption of this next dominant platform, characterised by mobility, cloud- based application and service delivery, and value- generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics." IDC also puts out a word of caution against companies such as Microsoft who have been traditional leaders in the software market. "While vendors with a PC heritage will scramble to secure their position in this rapidly expanding market, another battle will be taking place for dominance in the mobile apps market.

The level of activity in this market will be staggering, with IDC expecting nearly 25 billion mobile apps to be downloaded in 2011, up from just over 10 billion in 2010.

Over time, the still- emerging apps ecosystems promise to fundamentally restructure the channels for all digital content and services to consumers." The growth figures are staggering, though, for the new technologies. The report says: "The platform transition will be fueled by another solid year of recovery in IT spending. IDC forecasts worldwide IT spending will be $ 1.6 trillion in 2011, an increase of 5.7% over 2010. While hardware spending will remain strong (7.8% year- over- year growth), the industry will depend to a larger extent on improvements in software spending (5.3% growth) and related project- based services spending (3.5% growth), as well as gains in outsourcing (4% growth)." Emerging markets such as India and China alone, the report says, will account for half of the world's spending.

Don't browse online pornAmerican computer scientists have discovered a new web browser bug that tracks your computer history if you happen to visit a site that exploits it.

Top of the charts of such mala fide online destinations are pornographic websites. Pornographic websites, among others, take advantage of a javascript code that invades your computer to "rob" your data.

A University of San Diego team in California surveyed 50,000 websites and found 485 sites that use the bug to track your browsing habits thereby seriously hurting your privacy as well as making you vulnerable to receiving targeted ads as well as any other kind of malicious software.

Of the 485 sites that turned out to be guilty, the team said, 63 were copying user data and 46 were hijacking a user's history. You know what that means, right? Listen to your momma, don't do online porn.